Protect an Excel file

You can protect your Excel file with a password to prevent others from accessing data in your Excel files. This topic covers the two different ways you can protect an Excel file — using encryption, and the setting a password to open/modify an Excel file.

Notes: This topic covers file-level protection only, and not workbook or worksheet protection.

Be cautious when sharing files or passwords with other users. You still run the risk of passwords them falling into the hands of unintended users. Remember that locking a file with a password does not necessarily protect your file from malicious intent.

Encrypt an Excel file

When you encrypt an Excel file, you lock it with a password. Once you encrypt an Excel file, no one else will be able to open it. This is the most common and recommended technique to lock an Excel file.

Follow these steps to encrypt an Excel file:

Click File > Info > Protect Workbook > Encrypt with Password .

Enter a password, and click OK.

In the Confirm Password dialog box, reenter the password you entered in the previous step.

When you/another user tries to open the file, the following screen appears:

Set a password to allow reading or modifying

You can set two passwords on the file - one to open the file as read-only, and the other to modify. Then you can share the appropriate passwords with the users depending on the access level they should have.

Read-only access does not prevent someone from making changes to a file, but it does prevent them from saving those changes unless they rename the file and save it as something other than the original.

For users who need to be able to modify the file, you will have to share both open and modify passwords.

Follow these steps to set a password to open/modify an Excel file:

Note: In the Mac, go to File > Save As > Options, and then set the password to open or modify the file. Select Read Only if you want users to open the file as Read-only.

In the Excel file, click File > Save As.

Click a location, such as Computer or your My Site web page.

Click a folder, such as Documents or one of the folders on your OneDrive, or click Browse.

In the Save As dialog box, go to the folder you want to use, then click Tools and then click General Options.

You can specify one or both passwords here, one to open the file, another to modify the file, depending on your requirements.

Click Save.

When someone tries to open this file, Excel prompts for a password.

A second screen shows if there is a password to modify the file. Users who don’t have the modify password can click Read Only and start viewing the contents of the file.

You want to share your password-protected workbook with users who use Office Excel 2003 (the default file format is Excel 97-2003 (*.xls)). You saved the workbook to the *.xls format, but the password you set on the workbook has disappeared.

This happens because your version of Excel uses a new scheme for saving passwords, and the earlier file format doesn't recognize it. As a result, the password is discarded when you save your file to the Excel 97-2003 format.